This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Geneticists are debating whether the human male will become extinct between 125,000 years (5,000 generations) and 5 million years from now.
This debate is due to the exponential deterioration of the Y chromosome (which only men have), compared to the relative robustness of the X chromosome. Newly-published research states that Y chromosome deterioration will slow or stop. This presumably means that humans will not eventually evolve into unisexual organisms or simply die out. From the BBC:

Men may not become extinct after all, according to a new study.

Previous research has suggested the Y sex chromosome, which only men carry, is decaying genetically so fast that it will be extinct in five million years' time.

A gene within the chromosome is the switch which leads to testes development and the secretion of male hormones.

But a new US study in Nature suggests the genetic decay has all but ended.

Professor Jennifer Graves of Australian National University has previously suggested the Y chromosome may become extinct in as little as five million years' time, based on the rate at which genes are disappearing from the chromosome.

Genetics professor Brian Sykes predicted the demise of the Y chromosome, and of men, in as little as 100,000 years in his 2003 book Adam's Curse: A Future without Men. ... Genetic deterioration of the Y chromosome has occurred because unlike with the two X chromosomes in women, there is very little swapping of genetic material between the Y and X chromosome during reproduction. This means mutations and deletions in the Y chromosome are preserved between (male) generations.

"The X is fine because in females it gets to recombine with the other X but the Y never gets to recombine over almost its entire length, and shutting down that recombination has left the Y vulnerable to all these degenerative forces," said Dr Hughes, "which is why we're left with the Y we have today."

Commenting on the paper, Professor Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading and author of Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind, said that while there might be some squabbling in academic circles over the timings of the events, the paper told us there was a future for males in the very long term.

"It's a very nice piece of work, showing that gene loss in the male-specific region of the Y chromosome proceeds rapidly at first - exponentially in fact - but then reaches a point at which purifying selection brings this process to a halt."

4 comments:

Heh. I did a post on Dark Matter that contextualized the idea culturally. Scientific ideas can be partly informed by social fashions, although ironically it isn't fashionable to say so in scientific circles. That is, the language used to describe them and even some of their core concepts reflect the Zeitgeist. The genetic debate aside, dumping on the modern male has been in fashion for about 40 years.

About Me

Welcome to my blog, dedicated to the aporia, anomie, mysteries, and nervous tensions of the turn of the Millennium. I'm a writer and academic, trained in the field of history. These are my histories of things that define the spirit of our times. This blog also goes beyond historians' visions of the past, and examines how metatime and time are perceived in other media and disciplines, between generations, and in high and pop culture.